To minimize the use of that shopworn delaying tactic—and other haggling strategies that can drag out the car-buying process—more companies are experimenting with ways to slice the time consumers spend in vehicle showrooms.

Their tools range from mobile devices that can calculate a car's trade-in value in the parking lot to expanded call centers to handle rising traffic from smartphone shoppers.

Despite the long-standing promise of the Internet to streamline a vehicle purchase, it still takes two to three hours, on average, for a consumer to negotiate a new-car deal, hammer out financing and get enough training on a vehicle's technology to safely drive home, according to industry officials and researchers. Market research firm J.D. Power and Associates says new-car buyers spent 12.5% more time negotiating at showrooms last year than in 2010—even though more than 80% of buyers have already spent an average of 18 hours online researching models and prices, according to Google Inc. data.

AutoNation Inc.,AN0.86% the largest dealership chain in the U.S., says it is rolling out a new pricing strategy that will base selling prices not on the manufacturer's suggested retail price printed on the car-window sticker, but on current market data. New software will also allow salespeople to quickly present a menu of financing or leasing options. The company's goal: to cut transaction times in half.

ENLARGE

More companies are experimenting with ways to cut down on the time consumers spend in vehicle showrooms.
Bloomberg

AutoNation's Chief Executive Mike Jackson says customers are more price savvy than ever. "They've all done their homework," he says. "They don't want to step into a process designed for the village idiot."

Dealers say they're still learning how digitally savvy customers behave—which can sometimes involve more traditional channels. Group1 Automotive, a national dealership chain based in Houston, is gearing up to open a big call center to help people who shop on their smartphones. The company, which says it saw a 14% increase in phone information requests in 2012 over the year before, says the agents will speed smartphone callers to the nearest local dealer.

Rick Gibbs, chief executive of Dealer.com, which sells eCommerce software to car retailers, says more dealers are moving away from writing price offers on paper, and instead adopting digital "pencil tools." These software systems enable sales people to use an iPad program to quickly adjust variables such as the trade-in value of a used car or a down payment. That information can also be relayed to a sales manager, potentially eliminating some of the time wasted by sales people running back and forth to superiors to vet an offer.

Other parts of the negotiation can be streamlined as well. At Prestige Volvo in East Hanover, N.J., owner Matt Haiken says he equips his salespeople with software that can appraise a customer's trade-in vehicle by scanning the vehicle identification number into a system that links to regional pricing data for that vehicle.

A growing number of consumers are opting to reduce the time spent buying a car by outsourcing the bargaining process. Costco Wholesale Corp.COST0.00%, the big warehouse-club retailer, says 87,000 people in December asked for referrals to dealers through its car-buying service. The 2,700 dealers in Costco's network agree to sell at a discount—although Costco doesn't tell customers the price before they go to a showroom.

Truecar.com, a shopping site that operates car-buying clubs for Consumer Reports and other organizations, gives users online access to up to three price offers from dealers.

Mike Cavanaugh, 50, a biotechnology executive from Thousand Oaks, Calif., says he bought an Infiniti G37 from a dealer who had given him a quote through Truecar. Once he got to the showroom, he says it took just half an hour, "with small talk," to close the deal.

"I knew exactly what I wanted—the color and the options. The salesman said, 'I have two on the lot.' It was no hassle," he says. His previous car purchase, he says, "was probably a good hour and a half to two hours of back-and-forth negotiation."

One worry for consumers confronted with "no-haggle" pricing is that they will pay more than they should. While possible, the increasing accuracy of pricing information available online is narrowing the gap between the highest selling price a dealer can get for a car and the market average. Data compiled by Truecar shows that gap narrowing to $1,203 in 2013 from $2,361 in 2000—roughly the dawn of the e-commerce era. Truecar CEO Scott Painter predicts that by 2020, price transparency in the auto industry will have narrowed the price ranges for new-car transactions to the point where the customer who pays the most only pays $172 more than average.

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